If you're not a member of Webcomics.com, here's what you missed last month.

Site posts

Q&A: Mailbag apps and cutting out the middlemen

Critique series: Composition

Special imformation for users of Adobe CS2

Eisners, Hugos and Reubens: Deadlines, entry details, submission guidelines

Bonus post: Guest column on Bleeding Cool on the process behind creating my monthly comic downloads

Bonus post: Stuff Said podcast interview

DaFont: Site review

Bonus post: Bill Day and self-plagiarism

Open call for a new Hot Seat critique series on Web site design

Opinion: Steering clear of the sites and the snake-oil salesmen who make too-good-to-be-true claims

When to Give Up

Creating halftones for print

Bonus post: Breaking the Q1 slump

Guest post: Tone Deaf Comics convention set-up

Exercise for cartoonists

Psst. Back up your Web site

Private Forum

Reminder: ComicCraft's New Year's Day Sale

Developing a new comic -- issues with identity and copyright

What to sell in Artists Alley

Freelance debacle

Good software for remaking my site?

Kickstarter tiers -- what works?

What if digital comics adopted the Angry Birds model?

Taxes: Should I file annually or quarterly?

Comic Chameleon

Photoshop Autosave program

Google Reader problem

Mangamagazine.net

Tapastic

Creating effective tweets

Long-form comics

Table set-ups that can travel

Big Panda

Shifty Look

Postal Rate increase to Canada

Frendon Photoshop brushes

Advice on ending my long-running comic

Get out your calendar and start circling dates. It's time to do a little webcomics planning.

Today is the first of a series of group critiques on Web design. Same rules as all Hot Seat critiques. I'll share some thoughts on the topic and then open it up to discussion. Links to the comics being discussed are in the headers.

Observe to Exist

Going Overboard

The Webcomics.com Archive is so big, there's almost too much stuff that's worth reviewing to do only one Archive Dive a week. So every now and then, I'm going to do a Deep Dive. Consider it another bonus post. This one dates back to Feb. 22, 2010, and it focuses on a humor theory I've used for years called the Punchword. The post itself is very good -- but the conversation that ensues is pure gold.

... there are as many ways to build tension as there are to write punchlines, but here's a concept that I think has helped to maximize my tension-building: The punchword.

Punchword

The punchword is the word -- or short phrase -- that holds the greatest amount of surprise for your reader. It's the word with the greatest amount of charge where the joke is concerned. It's the word with all of the power.

Take a quick look at some of the effective punchlines you come across in your daily reading. Now dissect the punchline. There's one word that holds the most surprise -- the one that sticks the needle into the balloon.

I'll maintain that you should -- whenever possible -- hold off on that punchword until the very last moment.

Read the entire post and comment there.

Today's Archive Dive is from February 2, 2012, when I described how to set up a Project Wonderful ad as a default in ContextWeb (now called PulsePoint). Although the instructions are specifically directed towards ContextWeb/PulsePoint, they can be easily applied to any ad network provider.

Webcomics.com has long advocated the use of Project Wonderful -- and, when the time is right, using Project Wonderful as part of an ad chain.

Recently, during a ContextWeb 101 discussion, a member wrote in describing trouble that he had in getting Project Wonderful ads to work as part of a ContextWeb default.

I did a little research, and here's the solution to that problem.

Read the entire post and comment there.